Creating a digital marketplace for family planning

Date

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Project Objectives

Meeting the unmet demand for contraceptives would prevent more than two-thirds of unintended pregnancies and more than two-thirds of maternal deaths. Voluntary family planning has also been shown to improve newborn health outcomes, advance women's empowerment, and bring socioeconomic benefits through reductions in fertility and population growth. In short, family planning is an effective public health and economic development tool.

Yet among the populations that would benefit the most from family planning, uptake remains too low. There has been a resurgence of interest among public and private actors in promoting family planning, but new solutions are needed to help achieve ambitious goals. For instance, the FP2020 initiative was established in 2012 with a commitment to expand contraceptive services to an additional 120 million women and girls by 2020. As of July 2015, however, the pace of uptake lags behind the original target by 10 million users.

In response to this challenge, a team of researchers and technology entrepreneurs has created a digital marketplace in Kenya for women and families to connect with family planning providers. Using a voice based service accessible through a basic feature phone, women and families can determine the best contraceptive options based on their preferences, receive referrals & free transport to local facilities, and rate their experience.
We are recruiting at least two students to join our research team to design and implement a randomized encouragement trial to estimate the impact of the marketplace on the uptake of contraception among women with an unmet need for family planning.

This new SRT site in Kenya will provide students with an opportunity to design and implement an impact evaluation of a new digital marketplace for family planning. Students will join a growing team of students and professionals based in Durham, Boston, Zambia, and western Kenya.

Project Opportunities

Project Activities: Students will collaborate with team members to design the sampling and recruitment strategies, develop outcome measures, outline study procedures, prepare IRB documents, organize field data collection, analyze trial data, and write-up the results.

Project Application Process

1. Choose a project location that interests you
2. Complete the 2016-2017 application
3. Send a CV and a copy of your most recent transcript to gh-education@duke.edu
4. Deadline: October 24, 2016